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verb

‘to abstract science and religion from their historical context can lead to anachronism’

‘Surveys pick out contentious conclusions on divine unity and Trinity and Incarnation and other topoi, abstracted from the original warp and weft, as though the latter were mere packaging.’

‘This becomes abstracted from the original idea, possibly to become unrecognizable.’

‘It has been said, for example, that Aquinas is not really interested in the Trinity and the incarnation, that he is chiefly concerned to promote a notion of God abstracted from orthodox Christian teaching.’

‘From the mathematician's point of view, the advantage in abstracting a point from its diverse incarnations lies in the resulting generality.’

‘The flaw in that approach, in our submission, is that it tends to dismember the definition of ‘refugee’ in Article 1A and then abstracts a particular element from its context and seeks to say that the Tribunal must deal with that element.’

‘The soul forms in itself likenesses of things inasmuch as, through the light of agent intellect, forms abstracted from sensible objects are made actually intelligible, so as to be received in the possible intellect.’

‘It shouldn't be abstracted from the debate about Europe's crisis.’

‘Succeeds because it's stylistically brilliant, and because it hooks the experience of being black in America into universal human experiences of rage and alienation without ever abstracting or moving away from the particulars of race.’

‘You can know when a lake will freeze or a pot will boil by abstracting the big picture from all the little details.’

‘These are two senses in which mathematics is an abstract subject: it abstracts the important features from a problem and it deals with objects that are not concrete and tangible.’

‘Reason however in the Edinburgh Enlightenment was still prior to experience: the people are a body ‘out there’; visible, and abstracted from action.’

‘It has spawned a generation who look back upon a single act, abstracted from its consequences, as determinative of salvation.’

‘But, while Elkins writes good staccato dialogue, he abstracts his characters from society.’

‘By relating what Gandhi said to what he did and by examining instances of satyagraha led by others, this book abstracts from the Indian experiments those essential elements that constitute the Gandhian technique.’

2usually abstract something fromExtract or remove (something)

‘applications to abstract more water from streams’

‘If we abstract the technical from its social context and cultural foundations, technology appears to develop outside of society, following a trajectory of its own making.’

‘Greene was a poet, in the true sense of the word, and it is misleading and dangerous to abstract theological concepts from the work of a poet (a good poet), or from the drama of a concrete life.’

‘The County Council has contacted all group schemes abstracting from Lough Arrow in relation to their presence.’

‘If one wanted to abstract a general rule from the affair it might well be ‘to make a building look effeminate, trashy and like something out of Disneyworld, be sure to add banded pink stripes’.’

‘When devising a model, one tries to ignore as much as possible about the phenomenon under consideration, abstracting from it only those features that are essential to understanding its behaviour.’

‘Five of the lengthy series of lithographed modeles that Goupil aimed primarily at aspiring artists included motifs, mostly head studies, abstracted from Delaroche paintings.’

‘Potato producers who abstract water from Pembrokeshire's rivers and streams could have their licences revoked by new European legislation.’

‘The most egregious of these is the tendency, exemplified by Norm and Omar, to abstract a situation from the mesh of geopolitical considerations in which it is embedded and reduce it to a stark moral question.’

‘A potential toxic bloom has been found on the lake from which drinking water supplies for much of the county, including the towns of Killarney and Tralee and surrounding countryside, are abstracted.’

‘The point is this - we cannot abstract ideas from the historical epoch in which they appeared.’

‘I knew that I needed to abstract what I wanted from the general confusion and the disorder of the scene.’

‘Thus, once mixes are abstracted from their interpersonal context and reified within a commercial context, they lose much of their meaning.’

‘And, even though Patrick Mason's production is presented by Edinburgh's Royal Lyceum Company, I question his decision to abstract the play from its Irish setting with its echoes of the Ulysses Night-town sequence.’

‘This intermediate acts as a base to abstract protons from the Zn-H 2 O to produce the nucleophilic Zn-OH - species.’

‘But I take comfort in our inability to delineate the ‘entire picture’ - at best we can abstract a stable whole from the flow of its parts, and that can never be ‘true’.’

‘The primary student concerns with Module 6, as with Module 4 and Module 5, were the time needed to complete the module and the frustration encountered in abstracting the necessary information from some of the computer systems.’

‘In retrospect this appears so, but we have to remember that he abstracted his axioms from observation of the real world.’

‘Not only is the self unable to bestow form from lived life, but also the objects themselves cannot receive it until they are abstracted from their lived-life utility.’

‘The water has not been ‘predrunk’; it is not abstracted from a river and is as good as the best water you could find anywhere, even bottled.’

‘What makes the humanities (separate from the arts) important is that they take the areas where we have insufficient data and try to abstract useful principles from it.’

‘One thing suggested here is that only when you are able to abstract yourself, to look at yourself as if at a distance, as if you were mourning yourself, can you recognize yourself in a way that allows you to remember that you are alive at all.’

‘Rose found it hard to abstract herself from the lives of these women but she knew that she had to make that distance in order to tell their story without preaching her anger.’

‘Bunting even botches an attempt by his wife to reconcile, abstracting himself from the romance of the moment in pursuit of a dry, theoretical point.’

‘I removed my ‘About’ page and I took a conscious decision to abstract myself (though of course I'm not naïve enough to think that you won't find my name if you really want to).’

‘It assumes humans can abstract themselves from reality and go romping through history looking for the all-powerful distant cause that will explain each and every aspect of our current situation.’

‘So it's always the moment when I'm stuck in reality - I have to abstract myself from it.’

‘Even Thomas Aquinas in the thirteenth century decided that the mind must function primarily as intellect, abstracting itself from presence, to focus upon an ‘other’ that is external- ‘out there,’ whether that be called nature or God.’

‘It's melancholic, but never chilly in the way that much electronica can be and doesn't ever abstract itself out of existence.’

‘She abstracted herself from her inconvenient desire; she set herself at a distance from it and inspected it, as if it were a fungus of the spirit, asserting itself without permission.’

‘Indeed, its dramatic argument is that such a personality either abstracts itself out of existence or falls into contradiction and self-destructs.’